Turkey is the leader of the Turkish peoples that control the large strip of land from the Mediterranean to Western China. It is also a key ally of Israel. These days the traditionally Western/secular orientation of the country is being challenged. The Islamic Government is trying to weaken/destroy the Armed Forces, which are secular/anti-islamic. Ex-Navy and Air Force chiefs Özden Örnek and İbrahim Fırtına, and the Special Forces former chief Ergin Saygun, have been arrested in relation to the “Balyoz” (Sledgehammer) coup plot seven years ago. The plot allegedly involved plans to bomb mosques and seems totally imaginary. Many soldiers are already in jail in relation to Ergenekon network, which is accused of planning to foment unrest to provoke a military coup. The probe’s credibility has waned as police began arresting journalists, writers and academics known to be AKP critics, sparking accusations that it has degenerated into a campaign to silence the secularist opposition.
An Islamic Turkey will signify the realignment of Central Asia up to West China, and more problems for the Americans in Afganistan.
22 comments:
The US has been pushing for democracy in the region, and this is the result.
In a previous age, the Islamic agitators in Turkey would probably have been arrested and shot.
This is an example of victory by demography in a democracy. The educated secular elites of Turkey, mostly living in Istanbul, had a birth rate similar to other modern Western people (low). The backward rural peasants who hewed to traditional Islam continued to bear large numbers of children, so now the country has regressed. Ataturk is spinning in his grave.
I just saw an article about a Hungarian Hasidic (Satmar) woman who recently died at age 93 in NY. Her (only) accomplishment was that at the time of her death she had 2,000 living direct descendants due to the early marriage age and large # of children of the Orthodox. Apparently she spent all her time in her later years attending the weddings and brises and other celebrations of her offspring since there was such an event almost every week. My father-in-law is almost the same age and as a good secular person, he has 2 children and 5 grandchildren and no great grandchildren yet , for a total of 7 living descendants. So to whom does the future of the Jews belong?
K
K,
We dont know to whom belongs the future. Five grandchildren is quite above the average. Anyway, for us is rather late to do anything in this matter.
I don't know about the late part - there is no limit to the age at which men can have children. :-)
In the US it is fairly common for very successful men to "trade-in" their wives like they trade-in a car, for a newer model when their original wife has more than 100,000 km on the odometer. Often they have children with the new wife, so you'll see a much older man with his young wife and baby.
K
Only when Turkey has become a full theocracy will it be admitted to the European Union.
Anon.
K
In Argentina it was accepted that a man maintained a "casa grande" (a legal family) and a "casa chica" (a lower class family). Most public employees (middle class) did. But life was easier then.
Nowadays such behavior would be viewed as a disease or a crime and the man treated in a clinic for sex addiction - see Tiger Woods. Men made the rules for most of history and women complained that they were unfair, but now women are making the rules and they are no better.
It's true that we don't know the future (and I'll point out that you don't have to go too far back in the family tree of most Jews before you hit a solid wall of ancestors who were as frum as, and had has many children as, that Satmar woman). But if you have 5 secular grandchildren and I in the same time have 2,000 grandchildren and great grandchildren, whose bloodline is going to have more influence on who is elected to office in a democracy? And what happens when people who (whether haredi or salafi) don't really care about democracy (and in some ways are antithetical to it) end up running it anyway by virtue of their numbers?
K
In Argentina it was accepted that a man maintained a "casa grande" (a legal family) and a "casa chica" (a lower class family). Most public employees (middle class) did. But life was easier then.
I wonder if Greece's 3 million public employees do this.
Greece itself is the 'casa chica'.
Anon.
Do you mean that the German and British tourist that frequent Greece consider it their "casa chica"?
It appears to an outsider (who really enjoys the Greek ambience, and likes the Greek people) that the Greeks themselves may not be looking after their own home with the respect and sacrifice that it deserves.
I suspect that, collectively, they are not working hard enough and maybe too many are employed by, and paid too much by the state.
Why else are they in such trouble? We are all living beyond our means, more or less, but Southern Europe seem to be leading the way.
The tourists are their salvation, up to a point, but I doubt you can run an economy solely on tourism.
Israel, with much the same climate, certainly doesn't.
I am open for education on this, but a Euro collapse is not exactly what we need right now.
Anon.
Markets don't give you what you need, they give you what you deserve. The socialist "give us what we need" mentality is what created the problem in the first place.
There are some small island nations that have a 100% tourist based economy but Greece is a little too big for that, and the tourist sector is not recession proof - people can skip a vacation if the economy is bad.
The Greeks have the mentality of an occupied people (lately they have been making noises that the Germans did not pay enough war reparations, even though the Germans, thru their EU contributions, have sent billions to Greece - everywhere you go in Greece there is a road or a museum with a big sign indicating how many millions of Euros the EU sent). Their centuries of occupation by the Ottomans gave them the mentality that the government is the enemy that you cheat and steal from as much as possible (the Palestinians, another Ottoman subject people, think in a similar way). The fact that much of the Greek govt budget came from either borrowing or EU subsidy allowed this way of thinking to continue (even now after the crisis is clear it continues - no one wants to get off the gravy train) - when you stole from the gov't you were not stealing from yourself or from the Greek people, you were stealing from the Germans who certainly deserved it (in your mind). Again, even today people in Greece are saying such things (although they don't admit that it is "stealing" - it is "filling their social needs", etc.)
What is needed in such a situation, I'm sorry to say, is shock therapy - the victim of this disease has to be made aware that he is an adult and he alone is responsible for his own actions. Any German bailout will only reinforce the idea that the Greeks have been right all along and continue to be deserving of help.
The big mistake was adopting the Euro and this has to be undone. In Communist countries, the workers used to say "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" (and this system worked for a long time). The Greeks messed up the game (we pretend to work, they REALLY pay us, with lots of hard currency) - an unsustainable model. If the Greek workers were paid in pretend money (drachmas) then the government could continue to play the game with them. It's clear the Greek work force are children and have no intention of putting in an honest day's work even now, so the government should just pay them with piles of funny money and they will have no choice but to be satisfied.
K
Do you mean to say that the people who invented Western Civilization are not entitled to a free lunch forever?
(Or-maybe these aren't the same people; as has been seriously argued).
Anon.
I actually heard a Greek woman interviewed when she made the "you owe this to the Greeks as the inventors of civilization" argument in all seriousness. I kid you not. But honey, what have you done LATELY (i.e. the Golden Age of Greece ended 2500 years ago)?
K
The interesting question is why there was no second act out of them.
Anon.
Lightning rarely strikes twice. Great ideas are very rare. Keep in mind that after the Golden Age, Greek civilization was still the dominant civilization for the next 1000+ years - even the Romans patterned their culture and arts on the Greek and the eastern Roman Empire (which later became Byzantium) was Greek. Of course the country called Greece today is just a little rump of Greek empire and there is very little continuity between the ancient culture and the modern.
K
But are the same people?
Anon.
Meaning the direct blood descendants of the ancients? Probably to some extent, though there have been admixtures of other stock. But culturally the threads were broken long ago (though they have made attempts to restore them in the modern period). Greek peasants farming with their donkeys in mountain villages knew nothing of, and cared nothing for, the ancient piles of ruins that they lived among, nor of the philosophers, etc. - their works have survived only because they were preserved by others.
K
Latest news from Greece - the taxi drivers are on strike against a new law that requires them to pay their taxes. Taxi meters will be required to give receipts and maintain a record so it will be impossible (or at least more difficult) to underreport income tax. Apparently Greek taxi drivers regard cheating on their taxes as a national right or social benefit to which they are entitled. Again I point out that only in Greece is the word "thief" (klepht) something that has positive connotations. To think that such people could co-exist in an economic union with Germany was a mistake only a willfully blind "multiculturalist" could make. The same thing goes on in the US where all sorts of problems (such as education) are totally misunderstood (and you cannot have a cure unless you have a proper diagnosis first) because we are required to ignore the elephant in the room (race).
K
I think Barbados pays more tax than Greece.
Anon.
How well informed was your comment, Anon! I am writing this on May 7, and now it is obvious to all that contemporary Greeks are ... not paying taxes. I am very angry at them.
I am very angry at them.
Why? The other countries of Europe would have gone bankrupt anyway even if the Greeks were living within their means. As long as the consequences of the Greeks misbehavior falls squarely on them and not anyone else then there is no reason to worry. Absent mass immigration then the only countries that will be affected will those that have themselves misbehaved.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. If Ecuador were to go bankrupt a week after Greece would you conclude that Greece is responsible or would you rightly conclude that low IQ Catholic countries only behave financially when some evil Gringo has a boot on their neck?
Despite all of the hyperventilating over the financial fires in Greece, the real problem is that all of Southern Europe has finances like Latin America. And as I stated above the root cause of this is that both regions are Catholic. The bankruptcies of the Sothern European countries cannot be explained by way of IQ since SE countries like Spain have IQ's near 100 and have a rather impressive scientific output. Argentina may be a border case since Volkmer Weiss used the international PISA examination to calculate a national IQ of 79, whereas IQ and the Wealth of Nations estimates Argentina's IQ at 96.
If you combine the bankruptcy of almost every Catholic country with the leftist voting patterns of US Catholics the inescapable conclusion is that Catholic countries will most likely end up as deadbeats regardless of the circumstances.
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